Monopolization of Sports Videogames Continues



It appears that innovation in new sports videogames might take a real hit in the near future. Last month, we discussed how Electronic Arts--the publisher of John Madden Football and NFL Street--secured an exclusive 5-year licensing agreement with the National Football League and the National Football League Players' Association to develop, publish, and distribute football videogames. As a result, Sega's ESPN Football, Sony's NFL Gameday, and Midway's NFL Blitz will be discontinued or dramatically modified to exclude player names, team names, and related images.



Last week, in another blow to industry competition, Electronic Arts inked an exclusive 15-year licensing deal with ESPN that will make EA the sole licensee of the ESPN brand in all sports games. According to the Wall Street Journal, the agreement is worth around $850 million.



Now we learn that Take Two, the developer of Sega's baseball game, has secured a 7-year exclusive third-party rights agreement with Major League Baseball for use of the MLB brand in video games. Though first-party developers (i.e., Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft--companies that publish individual videogame consoles) may still use the MLB brand, the agreement precludes third party publishers, such as EA and Midway, from doing so. It is not apparent that this agreement also covers the Major League Baseball Players' Association, meaning that EA could still use the players' names and images in its MVP Baseball videogame (e.g., "Now batting, Manny Ramirez of the Boston . . . ah . . . team").

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